For those of you out there who don’t regularly like to watch PBS or KCET, they’re your friendly neighborhood public television stations out here in the city of angels. This past Tuesday and Wednesday night the documentary news show Frontline showcased their brand new segment entitled Bush’s War. This wonderfully insightful and also enraging program is the only film yet to truly put all the pieces together about the war in Iraq and just exactly how the entire series of events, right up till now, came to transpire.
Now, the whole thing is four hours long and was spread out over two nights, so I won’t be able to breakdown every facet of the program but I will give you a basic overlook as to possibly entice you into watching it or possibly buying it from PBS.com. Over the past several years we’ve seen several films made that try to decipher and unravel all the complicated and bazaar aspects of the Iraq war. Most focus on the human tragedy, in depth and up-close on the streets of Baghdad with some group of terrorists or children as they fight and die and then fight some more. The other tends to be a look at the personal side of the American soldiers, either once they’ve come home and are injured (mentally or physically, sometimes both) or while they serve their tour in country. Bush’s War is a much more intense and important look at the war and it’s done in a manner that leaves absolutely no doubt that what Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest of gang did was not only illegal, but immoral.
Tuesday nights episode or Part 1 takes us basically all the way from 9/11 to the infamous 16 words, better known as “The Yellow Cake Affair”. From the very opening the program grabs you by the scruff of your shirt, and sits you down. During the opening titles there is a montage of people who called either the police or 9-11 on September 11th. The last one is a man saying he’s not ready to die, but they’re doing pretty bad up there. Then suddenly he screams bloody murder and the phone cuts out. Obviously because the tower he was in was collapsing underneath him, I mean to tell you it is haunting, so much so you wont believe it. Next we get to have an insiders look at what was going on inside the White House while the attacks were underway. They thought the White House was a target as well as the Capital Building. You really get to see just how terrified and caught off guard those people were. It makes a lot of the 9/11 conspiracy stuff look a bit fishy. 
The evening of September 11th Rumsfeld was already asking people around him if they might be able to implicate Saddam Hussein with the attacks or Bin Laden. The CIA immediately took up the alternate opinion that Hussein had nothing to do with it and it was purely the work of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. 
Well that did not go over well with the boys at the Pentagon, and that led all the way to the Valerie Plane scandal. Cheney felt that the CIA was trying to use back channel politics to subvert their agenda and outed Plane for retribution.
The next portion discuses the infighting going on between Cheney, Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. It also begins to show the administrations move towards war. It’s at this point that Yellow Cake enters into the game. Apparently the Pentagon had gotten some bogus intelligence that Saddam was trying to buy enriched Uranium from Africa. The country of Niger is I guess a big manufacturer of the stuff and ended up being a perfect spot to cling to for this bull shit story. Well Cheney and the boys used this Yellow Cake crap as the foundation of the WMD argument and the “Smoking Gun into a Mushroom Cloud” thing.They would feed this BS intel to the press anonymously and then go on news talk shows quoting the press as the pentagon’s source for the info. The entire thing was made up, and we all bought it hook, line, and sinker.
The nation was still in shock over 9/11 and they used our moment or collective weakness to engineer a war, just for themselves and their friends. They killed American soldiers and innocent Iraqis by the boatload just for the fuck of it. I know your thinking big-deal I already know that, but when you see it all displayed out like that, in such horrific detail and accuracy, it’s just crippling.
Wednesday night’s episode or Part 2 focuses on the war itself and all the key military and political figures wrapped up in this saga. You really get a peek at just how bad the situation was on the ground and how impossible and poorly orchestrated this fiasco is. From Paul Bremer’s De-Baathification order that forced 30 to 50,000 people underground and pissed them way the hell off or the even worse decision to disband the Iraqi army which forced 300,000 or more men, with guns, to go underground and it was literally 72 hours after that choice was made that the first car bomb was exploded killing two American MP’s. Disbanding the army created the insurgency. There is no doubt, all the evidence is spelled out as plain as day, but by all means don’t just take my word for it, see for yourselves because people couldn’t make this shit up.
I don’t think anyone wants Saddam back but no one can say that Iraq is in better condition now then it was before we invaded. We would also have 4,000 less dead soldiers on our hands, and who knows how many poor Iraqis. The hardest part to swallow is that the entire reason we are there is based and founded on lies. I’m not just speaking in generalities here; we’re talking provable stuff. Lots and lots of documented fabrications and exaggerations. When you combine BS with poor planning it should be no surprise what your end result is going to look like, but we ended up with a hell of a lot more then just egg on our face, we ended up with our faces blown off. Here on Cityzine we published a list of just how much this whole damn thing has cost us all, and it is really staggering. Because it’s not just numbers, it’s lives. In the 60’s the Vietnam conflict could at least in some part be linked to the Cold War, but Iraq is absolutely linked to nothing, it’s just air, something floating in the breeze like a rumor or gossip, except these stories are drenched in blood.
If this isn’t enough to make you say “I HAVE TO WATCH THIS” I don’t know what I can do to get you to want to pay attention. I know we as a nation are suffering from Iraq-Fatigue, but this is on a whole other level. We owe it to the dead to listen and watch so we can make sure this can never happen again. We must become knowledgeable about the ways in which people in positions of such high power can prey on our vulnerabilities to move us into directions we’d never normally go. This war should have never happened and yet it seems to be the war that might never end, at least not in our lifetime. We can remember the Hundred Years War between France and Great Britain, do we really want this to go on and on, no of course not, but we may not be able to stop it, but we can at least prevent it from happening in another country sometime down the line. If watching this program is just one step out of many in the right direction then it’s the least we can do. PLEASE LOOK IT UP & WATCH.
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1 response so far ↓
1 nathan118 // Jul 19, 2008 at 12:01 am
Yellowcake wasn’t the only WMD people thought he might have, so to expand one mistake into this was all a “lie” is a big stretch.
I’ll wait for your explanation why these 15 countries on the UN Security council in ‘02 all thought he had WMD:
Bulgaria
Cameroon
China
Colombia
France
Guinea
Ireland
Mauritius
Mexico
Norway
Russian Federation
Singapore
Syria
United Kingdom
United States
And why prominent Democrats like Pelosi, Clinton (both), Gore, Kerry, and Ted Kennedy all thought Iraq had WMD.
And as looked to back up my sources, I found the following:
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=w0705129A
That’s a heck of a lot of yellowcake in Iraq. But you’re right, Saddam never wanted to make a nuke. Maybe this frontline program has some big holes in it.
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